Dear Stoner: How Can I Make a Bowl More Potent?

Dear Stoner: I have a metal pipe that I can unscrew and clean, and the other day I had a great idea: What if I put a nug in there to get nice and sticky after smoking a few bowls? Will it be more potent?JustBlaze

Dear Blaze: Now I know why natives get so annoyed with transplants, because no one who grew up here would ever think of doing such a stupid thing. No offense. Yes, sticking a nug in a pipe while you smoke can be a jailhouse way of coaxing it to get you a little higher, but it comes at the cost of your tastebuds, lungs and brain cells. That black stuff that covers the inside of your pipe is basically tar with some THC in it. Smoking it gets you high, but it’s not worth the damage it does to your lungs or brain cells while you’re coughing for five minutes — and it tastes like Bigfoot’s dick.

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Take advantage of the beautiful state you live in, where pot enhancement is readily — and, more important, legally — available. A small drop of hash oil over a bowl will get you higher than a tar-coated nug ever could; some dispensaries even sell buds that are coated in the stuff. A small pinch of kief will also do the trick, and you can collect that yourself if you buy a grinder with a screen in it. Whatever you do, stay away from the metal hardware.

Dear Stoner: I got my hands on a half-ounce of herb and wanted to make edibles, but I’m scared they’ll get me too high. Is there any way I can figure out how potent they’ll be?Chef P

Dear Chef: THC content in edibles is measured in milligrams, which is a measure of weight. So if you have a half-ounce of marijuana flower, all you need to do is find the THC percentage and convert accordingly. Remember, homegrown stuff is a little harder to estimate, and although dispensaries put flower THC percentages on packaging, they’re not always as high as advertised. Assuming you have a decent estimate of your THC percentage, though, it’ll just take some basic math.

To make this easy, let’s say your half-ounce of flower tested at 20 percent THC. An ounce equals 28,349.5 milligrams, so half an ounce would be 14,174.75 milligrams — and the THC would account for 20 percent of that. If you extract all of the THC out of the flower while making some pot butter, then you should get around 2,835 milligrams of THC. How much butter you want to cook with in order to spread out all that THC is up to you.